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If the Air Canada Centre was sound asleep for most of Monday night, it’s at least partly because the Maple Leafs, in the first 40 minutes of their game against the New Jersey Devils, managed to put five shots on goal.

Two periods, zero goals, next to zero drama — you could hear the collective griping in the expensive seats: And people say the Blue Jays are having a tough start.

But just when the NHL looked like the Nothing Happening League, James Reimer turned a non-event into a game to talk about. He also turned what should have been a lopsided loss into a 2-0 Leafs win.

Never mind that the Leafs were outshot 32-13. Never mind that, at one point in a third period in which the Devils pelted Reimer with 16 shots, New Jersey’s Patrik Elias was so convinced he’d finally breached the Leaf goal line that he raised his stick in triumph. But much to the delight of the ACC faithful, Reimer’s well-placed pads repelled all challengers to earn his ninth career shutout.

Toronto coach Randy Carlyle has said again and again this season: we don’t need our goaltenders to steal games; we merely need them to give us a chance to win them. But Reimer engineered an outright heist of Monday’s result. Raised a devout Mennonite in a tiny town in Manitoba, perhaps he’ll be forgiven from breaking this particular commandment. He was, after all, guilty only of stealing from the Devils. And perhaps it was fitting that Reimer’s godly devotion to keeping the puck on the right side of the goal line kept the greatest Devil of them all, Hall of Fame-bound goaltender Martin Brodeur, stuck at 666 career wins.

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“I had my hands up,” Elias would say later, lamenting that near-goal. “Marty (Brodeur) said it’s a $50 fine for celebrating and not scoring.”

On a night when Reimer unfurled a series of spectacular saves that got the crowd chanting his surname — most notably on a third-period penalty kill in which he made four stops in relatively quick succession — it was enough to make even Brodeur wonder why Leafs GM David Nonis had spent a much-publicized trade-deadline afternoon trying, and ultimately failing, to bolster the Leafs in the crease.

“If he plays like that every game, I don’t know why they’re looking to get another goalie in here,” Brodeur said.

Lovers of defensive hockey will spare a thought for the Devils, who have been one of the league’s hard-luck stories of late. They came into the game without a win in their previous nine games. And while they’d been outshooting opponents over that span by an average of about 10 shots a game, 31-21, they’d been averaging less than two goals a game while giving up three goals a game.

“Absurd,” is the word New Jersey coach Peter DeBoer conjured to describe the latest chapter of their winless run.

The Devils have been the anti-Leafs, in other words. Toronto has been winning despite being routinely outshot, the Leafs now boasting a 19-7-5 record when outdone on the shot counter. Various statistical forecasters will tell you this means they’ve been playing over their heads; that their results don’t match their actions; that a regression is in the offing.

But the Leafs are spinning it another way for now.

“Good teams find a way to win,” Carlyle said. “We found a way to manufacture points tonight.

“Did we deserve it? Well, our goalie stole us a hockey game.”

Said defenceman Cody Franson: “You’re not always going to win every game the perfect way. A lot of it has to do with mental durability and some of the things we’ve preached from day one here. . . . You bend, don’t break. Last year we were pretty fragile. We broke too easy. This year, we’re a lot stronger mentally. We’re more of a bending-type team than a breaking one.”

If the ACC seemed giddy at the sight of Reimer’s plastic-man act, consider that such in-the-crease acrobatics haven’t been shown off to such meaningful ends in a long while in Leafland. Certainly Reimer isn’t one to suggest it will be an every-night thing.

“Sometimes things happen. Pucks hit you when you’re not quite sure they will. Or you read the play better than you normally do, the puck gets bigger, blah-blah-blah, all that stuff,” Reimer said. “But having said that, sometimes that happens and you let in three in a row. There were moments today when I was feeling good. But as a goalie, you kind of stand there and you tell yourself just to hold on, just keep working. You don’t get caught up in the moment, because things can kind of change way too quick.”

This kind of change, of course, is way overdue in the centre of the hockey universe, where the NHL has been the Nothing Happening League during the post-season since 2004, and where Leaf fans are willing to weather the bending and hope for some breaks.

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